Stomping Grounds: Top 50 spots in San Diego sports history

Police happened upon the scene and informed Thomas he had an hour to remove the car. As Rancho Santa Fe’s Carl Eckstrom recalls, Thomas worked the beach, bumming money from sunbathers to cover the towing.

The yarn merits revisiting for two reasons. One: it reflects the casual, partying vibe created at Windansea when the Shack surfaced. And two: Eckstrom, 72, and the car’s owner, Billy Graham, are links to the Shack’s genesis.

The shack was erected in 1947 by three local surfing pioneers – Don Oakey, Fred Kenyon and Eckstrom’s older brother, Woody. Oakey, who passed away in 2004, is credited with building the shack at an angle in relation to the beach rather than parallel to the shoreline.

In 1998, when the Shack earned its historical designation, Oakey told the Union-Tribune: “It just seemed like an aesthetic thing to do. That spit of land went out at an angle and the (offshore) reef is at an angle like that, too.”

Be it planned or serendipitous, the Shack’s eastern and western eucalyptus poles align at an angle, pointing toward the “peak,” the most desirable spot to catch waves.

Windansea is not where one learns to surf. When the swell is right, the outermost reef creates big, violent waves. On Sept. 24, 1954, Robert Simmons ventured into the water when the swell was pounding by mid-afternoon.

“It was strong eight feet,” said Eckstrom, who was 13 at the time and watched Simmons surf from the bluff. “It was a clean, beautiful, sunny day.”

Simmons’ orange board washed ashore. Rumors spread that he had gone to grab something to eat. But his clothes were stashed where he always stored them – nestled in one corner of the Shack.

Three days later, Simmons’ body washed ashore. He was 35.

Surfers of that era, often toting 100-pound wooden planks, were considered mavericks, and the best weren’t scared off by Windansea’s reputation. One of the meanest and most talented in the 1960s was a local Navy brat named Butch Van Artsdalen, who never backed down from a fight, be it in the water or out.

“Just trying to be No. 1 top dog,” said Graham. “Nobody screwed around with him.”

Van Artsdalen was a goofy-footer, surfing’s term for a rider who plants his right foot forward.

“If a goofy-foot went out (Van Artsdalen) would sit there, watch him and you could see the hair stand up on his neck,” said Graham. “He’d go out and show the guy what was what.”

Windansea’s reputation spread up the coast and across the ocean to Hawaii. Big-wave adrenalin junkies descended upon the spot, leaning their mammoth boards against the Polynesian-style hut.

With the Shack serving as the on-shore magnet, by the 1960s the beach turned into a surfing Shangrila.

Merryweather, who was married to Mike Hynson, a Windansea surfer who starred in “The Endless Summer,” nostalgically recalls the era.

“You surfed by day, played music at night and somebody would dive into the water, pull out abalone and bring up dinner,” she said.

Graham was a youngster delivering the San Diego Union when he stopped to gauge the surf and stumbled across the morning-after party scene at Windansea.

Said Graham: “I’d see sleeping bags all around with mixed couples in them and I’d go, ‘Oh my god!’”

Tom Wolfe’s fictional “The Pump House Gang” is based on time the dapper novelist spent hanging around Windansea. Andy Warhol created a film linked to the landmark beach.

Merryweather, a former New York model who hung in Wolfe’s circle, gallantly protects her treasure, panning both Wolfe’s and Warhol’s art related to her treasure.

“It was the stupidest, dumbest movie ever in the history of the world,” she said of Warhol’s work. “When it was over, I had to go home and take a shower. It was about alcoholic crack heads who come to La Jolla to try to turn surfers gay.”

Today, surfers still stash towels beneath the Shack. Lifeguards sit perched just to the left, surveying the surf. It’s an outdoor studio for professional photographers.

By working to have the Shack named a San Diego historical site 15 years ago, supporters preserved a landmark.

“We wanted to keep one beach, a beach where you could say, ‘This is how it looked in the 1920s,’” said Merryweather. “No bathroom, no stairs, no Ferris wheel, no hot dog stand.”

On a postcard late Sunday afternoon, a wood-paneled station wagon bends around the corner of Bonair and Nepture.

A male in his 20s with a week’s worth of facial scrub stops on his beach cruiser, assessing the Windansea surf.

A couple with a toddler adorned in a white dress pose beneath the Shack, a photographer creating pictures that will decorate the couple’s home.

And on the stone wall above Windansea, 16-year-old Miles Herrera, the top of his wetsuit stripped to his waist, studies the waves.

Herrera lives in Mission Bay and surfs Windansea once or twice a week. He says teenagers in the water swap tales about the Shack, retelling that storms twice demolished the structure, only for it to stubbornly resurface again.

But does he feel the spiritual presence that locals 50 and 60 years his senior swear exists?

“Whenever it’s less crowded, there’s more ocean, the cliffs are in the background, it seems more like nature,” says Herrera. “It’s like a sanctum, a sanctuary.”